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Asus has jumped the gun on AMD's 7-series chipset announcement by unveiling today a pair of motherboards based on two of the as-yet-unannounced product family.

This morning, Asus posted details of its M3A32-MVP Deluxe and M3A mobos on its website. The first board, which will also be made available in a version with Asus' integrated Wi-Fi access point technology, will be based on the 790FX chipset.

According to Asus, that means it will be able to deliver support for 1066MHz DDR 2 memory - with a Socket AM2+ Phenom processor, that is - and four PCI Express 2.0 x8 slots. The chipset is based around a HyperTransport 3 bus capable of 5200 million transfers per second (MT/s).

Asus' M3A32-MVP: based on AMD's unannounced 790FX chipset

Overclockers will find the board's heatpipe rig for memory modules, Asus claimed. They'll also appreciate the mobo's Precision Tweaker 2 overclocking software, which can "provide 0.02V per step adjustments to the northbridge voltage, southbridge voltage, and the DRAM voltage".

The 790FX chip connects to AMD's standard SB600 I/O part, which contributes to the six 3Gb/s SATA ports and one eSATA connector the M3A32-MVP Deluxe offers. The board also provides eight-channel HD audio and Gigabit Ethernet.

The second board, the M3A, uses AMD's 770 chip and, again, the SB600. This board can also handle 1066MHz DDR 2 memory if a Socket AM2+ CPU is used - 533MHz or 800MHz otherwise - but only provides a single x16 PCIe 2.0 slot. It can also host four 3Gb/s SATA devices.

Details about the 790FX and its RD790 foundation have been doing the rounds for some time, but the low-end 770, mentioned for the first time by Asus, is new to us. Can we also expect a 780 when the chipset launches later this month?